Don Quixote, The Man of La Mancha

Man of La Mancha is a 1964 musical adaptation from Wasserman’s non-musical 1959 teleplay I, Don Quixote, which was in turn inspired by Miguel de Cervantes and his seventeenth-century masterpiece Don Quixote.

Don Quixote, The Man of La Mancha tells the story of the “mad” knight, Don Quixote, as a play within a play, performed by Cervantes and his fellow prisoners as he awaits a hearing with the Spanish Inquisition. The work is not, and does not pretend to be, a faithful rendition of either Cervantes’ life or of Don Quixote. Wasserman complained repeatedly about taking the work as a musical version of Don Quixote.

The original 1965 Broadway production ran for 2,328 performances and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The musical has been revived several times on Broadway, becoming one of the most enduring works of musical theatre.

The principal song, The impossible Dream, became a standard. The musical has played in many other countries around the world, with productions in Dutch, French (translation by Jaques Brei), German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Icelandic, Gujarati, Uzbek, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Finnish, Ukrainian and nine distinctly different dialects of the Spanish language.

Book by Dale Wasserman; lyrics by Joe Damon; and music by Mitch Leigh. Directed by Margarita Galvan.